Use Time Machine Server In Mavericks Server To Backup Macs

The Time Machine service in Mountain Lion Server hasn’t changed much from the service in Lion Server. To enable the Time Machine service, open the Server app, click on Time Machine in the SERVICES sidebar. If the service hasn’t been enabled to date, the ON/OFF switch will be in the OFF position and no “Backup destination” will be shown in the Settings pane.

Click on the ON button to see the New Destination screen, used to configure a list of volumes as a destinations for Time Machine backups. The selection volume should be large enough to have space for all of the users that can potentially use the Time Machine service hosted on the server. When you click the Choose button, a list of volumes appears in a standard Finder selection screen.

Here, click on the volume to save your backups to in the sidebar. In most cases the Backup destination will be a mass storage device and not the boot volume of the computer. Once selected, click Choose and then if desired, limit the amount of storage on the volume to be used for backups. Click Create and a share called Backups is created and the service will start. Don’t touch anything until the service starts. Once started, add a backup destination at any time using the plus sign button (“+”) and defining another destination.

Note: A new feature in Mavericks Server is allowing for multiple backup destinations using the Server app, as well as allowing administrators to manage backups using the Backups tab.

Time Machine Server works via Bonjour. Open the Time Machine System Preference pane and then click on the Select Backup Disk button from a client to see the server in the list of available targets, much as you would do with an Apple Time Capsule.

Under the hood, a backup share is creating in the file sharing service. To see the attributes of this share, use the serveradmin command followed by the settings option and then the sharing:sharePointList:_array_id:<Path to backup target>, so for a path of /Volumes/New Volume 1/Shared Items/Backups use:

Once the service is running, administrators frequently fill up the target volume. To move data to another location, first stop the service and then move the folder (e.g. using mv). Once moved, use the serveradmin command to send settings to the new backup path. For example, to change the target to /Volumes/bighonkindisk, use the following command:

Additionally you can also query for the service to verify it’s running using full status:

sudo serveradmin fullstatus timemachine

Which outputs something similar to the following:

timemachine:command = "getState"
timemachine:state = "RUNNING"

While I found plenty to ramble on about in this article, Mass deployment is still the same, as is client side configuration. One change that appeared in Mountain Lion is that the screen for the Time Machine Options on the client no longer has an option for managing Versions, as seen here.